With finishes of 28th and 21st in the last two races, Dale Earnhardt Jr. currently sits 11th in the Chase for the Sprint Cup Standings, 31 points out of the top eight to advance to the third round.
“We needed to win here,” Earnhardt commented following the race at Kansas. “A top five ain’t going to do it and a top 10 ain’t going to do us no good. It was either come here and win or wrap it up and go to Talladega and try to win there. I feel pretty good about that.”
Needless to say, entering Talladega Superspeedway, it looks to be win or bust for the driver of the No. 88 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports.
That is something that sits fine with Earnhardt as he says there’s nowhere else he’d rather be going.
“That is a good opportunity for us,” he commented. “Even over Daytona, I think we can go to Talladega and do the job. There is a little more room there to be aggressive and make the moves you need to make. I got the car. That car won the 125, ran third in the (Daytona) 500 and won Talladega and won Daytona. That is a good enough car. I wouldn’t want to be going anywhere else if it’s a win and you are in kind of deal.”
As Earnhardt noted, the chassis that he will drive won the Gatorade Duel 150 in February at Daytona, third in the Daytona 500 while winning the last two restrictor-plate races; Talladega in April and Daytona in July. Earnhardt is known as one of the best on the restrictor plate tracks, having won at Talladega on six different occasions.
“When you look at all the tracks where would myself and I’m sure where my fans think we’ve got a shot to win, where else would we want to be going besides Talladega? Looking forward to it,” he added.
A victory would certainly help put Sunday in the rear-view and make it easier to deal with as it certainly wasn’t the race that he was looking for. Earnhardt would run just outside of the top-10 all day before having to make an unscheduled pit stop under green for a loose wheel.
“We don’t know which one it was we came in so quick it didn’t beat up the wheel enough to give us a real indication of which one it was,” he commented. “I knew we needed to come down pit road. We had a fast car, just never really had good track position and got behind. We didn’t come here to run second or top five we don’t need that we need a win. We had to try to go out there and win and we just got behind.”
Beyond that issue, though, Earnhardt added that he is certain something else was wrong as they “had a lot of wheels shaking, tires shaking because of the wheels spinning inside the tire. Every set we had today except for one didn’t shake”.
